A new federal law called SESTA (Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act) has endangered sex workers and resulted in their erasure from online platforms that once provided work, community and safety.

Organized in collaboration with Melissa Gira Grant and Danielle Blunt, Hacking//Hustling: A Platform for Sex Workers in a Post-SESTA World is a two-day program of conversations and tactical skill sharing led by sex workers to generate knowledge that has been erased in the wake of SESTA. Hacking//Hustling is a space for digital rights advocates, journalists, and allied communities to come learn from sex workers and better understand the developing effects of SESTA on internet freedom for all. This program was organized with the belief that sex workers are the experts of their own experience and an internet that is safe for sex workers, is an internet that is safe for almost everyone.

A panel organized and moderated by Melissa Gira Grant and Danielle Blunt, will feature presentations from sex workers and sex worker rights advocates with a discussion on censorship, discrimination and policing in the wake of SESTA.

Following the panel, a half-day workshop (in collaboration with t4tech) will take place Saturday, September 22. Sex workers and digital rights advocates will work together to address the harms of SESTA legislation with a collaborative approach grounded in principles of harm reduction. We will learn how to to protect data, have safer communications, and build stronger online communities.

Melissa Gira Grant is a senior staff reporter covering criminal justice at The Appeal and the author of Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work (Verso). She has been a contributing writer at the Village Voice and Pacific Standard, and her work has also appeared in the Guardian, the New York Times, BuzzFeed News, the New York Review of Books, and the Nation, among others. Her essays are collected in Best Sex Writing, The Feminist Utopia Project, and Where Freedom Starts: Sex Power Violence #MeToo. She lives in New York.

Danielle Blunt (she/her) is a NYC-based Dominatrix, a full-spectrum doula and sex worker rights activist. She studies power dynamics through kinesthetic modalities and researches the intersection of public health, sex work and equitable access to tech. Her work has appeared in Kink & Code, Tits & Sass and Psychology Today. She enjoys watching her community thrive and making men cry.

Kiara St. James, has been a community organizer and public speaker for over 20 years. She has been instrumental in changing shelter policies that were discriminatory towards the Trans community. Kiara is the Founder and current Executive director of the New York Transgender Advocacy Group (NYTAG inc), A grassroots 501c-3 non-profit organization, that is Trans-led and intent on creating new opportunities for the Trans community, through various partnerships and innovative initiatives.

Bardot Smith is the alias of an analyst, producer, and demimondaine living on the East Coast. She focuses her time on private consulting, erotic media production, and writing on economics and sex under capitalism. She enjoys pissing on men. She is currently studying for her Series 65.

Lorelei Lee is a writer, sex worker, and activist. She began doing sex work in 2000 and has worked both on and offline. Her fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in Salon, The Rumpus, WIRED, Denver Quarterly, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Buzzfeed, The Establishment, and $pread Magazine, as well as in the anthologies Hos, Hookers, Call Girls and Rent Boys, Off the Set, The Feminist Porn Book, and Coming Out Like A Porn Star.

There will also be a community art show, curated by Brit Schulte, highlighting protest art/resistance ephemera from recent demonstrations against SESTA/FOSTA and calling for decriminalization, and labor rights for all sex working/trading people.

Brit Schulte (they/them) is a community organizer and under-employed sex working art historian currently splitting time between Chicago and New York City. They are a member of the Support Ho(s)e collective, Survived & Punished NYC and are the lead coordinator for the Justice for Alisha Walker Defense Campaign. Brit’s current organizing efforts center criminalized survivors, prison abolition and the decriminalization of all sex work/trade.

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